Satya Nadella received some valuable words of wisdom from his predecessor when he took over as Microsoft CEO in 2014.
After Steve Ballmer announced his retirement from Microsoft — where he worked for more than 30 years, including 14 years as the company’s second-ever CEO — he shared some advice with his successor,
Those five words proved to be “one of the best pieces of advice” Nadella ever received, he told students at a 2019 event at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“If you’re not bold, you’re not going to do much of anything,” explained Nadella. “If you’re not right, you’re not going to be here.”
The advice may sound a bit simple, even obvious. But for Nadella, it underlined the fact that he’d need to make his own mark as CEO of one of the world’s biggest companies — and that he’d better be effective if he wanted to last long in that role.
Some other tech CEOs tout similar advice. Amazon’s leadership “principles,” penned by founder Jeff Bezos, dictate that good leaders should both “think big” and be “right, a lot.” “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a YouTube video posted on May 21, adding that the idea of being right “is very much a proxy for judgment.”
Good leaders consider a wide range of viewpoints before using their own judgment to choose the best way forward, said Jassy.
Nadella seems to agree. The most successful CEOs are “learn-it-all’s” who seek out new knowledge and ideas to inform their decisions, and aren’t afraid to make big changes, he told Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant in a 2018 interview.
Microsoft’s market value is currently nearly $3 trillion, up from around $300 billion when Nadella took over as CEO. Some of that success can be traced back to Ballmer’s parting advice: Nadella credits his former boss with pushing him to “be bold” with Microsoft’s push into cloud computing.
Nadella led the development of Microsoft’s Azure cloud business while working under Ballmer. Microsoft’s growth in that sector — turning a research project into a salable product — has fueled much of the company’s success since Nadella became CEO, in February 2024.
Azure accounted for more than half of Microsoft’s total annual revenue in 2024, according to the company’s most recent annual report.
“The guy who gave me permission to do all this was Steve Ballmer,” in 2020. “He wanted us to be bold and go at the cloud very aggressively, and that’s what we did.”
